by Michael Todd
Fight for Life and Death
Apocalypse Paused™ Book 1
Michael Todd
Michael Anderle
Fight for Life and Death (this book) is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2018 Michael Todd, and Michael Anderle
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
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First US edition, December 2018
Contents
In The Beginning
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Connect with Michael Todd
Books by Michael Todd
Books written as Michael Anderle
The For Life and Death Team
JIT Readers
Crystal Wren
John Ashmore
Mary Morris
Nicole Emens
Editor
SkyHunter Editing Team
Dedication
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
to Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
to Live the Life We Are
Called.
In The Beginning
In the beginning, the world heard nothing but rumors. Governments would neither confirm nor deny that an alien ship had fired a missile towards Earth.
And then disappeared.
However, there were plenty of rumors and some proof, so it became an unverified truth which those who researched believed.
When the governments finally admitted we had captured an alien missile, they talked about the new abilities and capabilities the people of the Earth were gaining.
Then, rumors about the ZOO started to leak.
It was supposed to be a super-scientific method of reclaiming the Sahara Desert, one which would help the feed Earth’s burgeoning population. Instead, it has become Pandora’s box, offering untold riches and scientific discoveries that could heal every disease mankind knows.
Or bring about the apocalypse—the end of the world, some say.
But aren’t the doomsayers always suggesting the end of the world is upon us?
Dates are hard for those of us not at the ZOO to learn. By the time the truth (whether “the truth" was accurate has always been up for debate) was revealed, decades later, we only knew of the timeline demarcated by “Walls.”
The biodomes where the ZOO was started became known as Wall 00. Three miles away, in a rough circle, was Wall 01. That was built almost immediately by four major countries—the United States, Russia, China and the UK (and all of their allies.)
Within ten years or so, Wall 02 was completed. It was larger and had seven small military bases, or towns, surrounding the ZOO. By the time Wall 02 was finished, Wall 03 was under construction some hundred miles away from Wall 00.
Seven Cities would eventually be built around the outside of Wall 03. But that is a story for later.
For now, all you need to know is that it took decades to finish, and in the middle of this construction, the ZOO was deadly.
Everything in it was actively trying to get out.
Prologue
She had to keep running.
The sounds of death were fainter now, and she fell against a tree and gasped for air. Its trunk was as green as its leaves and slick with greenish sap. For all its height, it was a young plant compared to its nigh-infinite number of siblings. This emerald hell was at once unnatural and hyper-natural. She had never seen anything like it. But she couldn’t reflect on that now and rather needed to breathe and rest. She heaved and sobbed in the enveloping shadows, careless of the rips and stains that marred her once-white lab coat.
The sound rose behind her again, little more than a rushing breeze through the forest. But a familiar buzz carried beneath it and with that sound came fear, for this wind was armed. Branches snapped, limbs cracked, and thick leaves burst and shredded as they were rent apart.
Dr. Marie took one last gasping breath. She knew what she had to do and sent the order to every limb in her body.
Run!
Something crashed overhead and sailed through the canopy. She didn’t pause to consider it. Her feet churned the earth as she ran as far from the base as they would carry her. Panic sharpened her senses but reduced her ability to reason. Sticks, vines, and thorns tore at every part of her they could touch. Squirming creatures wriggled underfoot from time to time and threatened to send her sprawling. Her lungs felt close to bursting. But that would be a merciful way to go, all things considered. It was better than what her colleagues had suffered.
Still, she pressed on through this Garden of Good and Evil she had helped to create. She had believed in what they were doing here, that Earth itself could be transformed and saved by humankind from the very ailments humans had inflicted upon it. The decades of pollution and overdevelopment, the ravages of wars and nuclear tests, the destruction of countless habitats… All might be reversed. All because, strangely enough, of a weapon. A weapon that, ironically, gave life instead of taking it.
But now this had happened.
The trees thinned ahead and the noise was no stronger than it had been, despite one of them flying past while she rested. She’d managed to keep ahead of them. Gaps appeared in the foliage. Streaks of pale tan and bright blue pierced the endless green. She would make it.
She’d barely accepted the truth of that when the jungle ended. Her ripped and dirty shoes stood upon new ground. Sand and rock stretched for miles in either direction and the sky was neon-blue and cloudless. There were no plants and no animals. No water and no life.
“Thank God,” Dr. Marie gasped. She sank to her knees in the hot barren earth, spread her arms wide to the desert, and closed her eyes against the blinding sun. “Thank God…”
She took a moment to revel in her freedom. The rushing, buzzing sound was still audible, but she doubted they would risk the open desert. It was not their habitat. There was nothing there for them to survive on. The sun’s intense rays lessened and she opened her eyes in confusion. There hadn’t been so much as a cloud before, but now…
The sky had gone dark.
“What—”
Millions of tiny forms rose over the shelf of rock on the horizon, and with them came another that grew to a deafening roar. The enormous cloud couldn’t be disputed. But as it drew close
r, she saw how it writhed and tattered as the drone became almost unbearable. Dr. Marie’s face paled with horror. Insects. A horde—no a plague—headed directly for the jungle.
Insects meant protein. Protein meant food. And food meant—
“Oh no.”
She turned and screamed. A surge of green flowed between the trees and under the brush, like a school of piranhas swimming through the air into the waterless wastes beyond. There would be no high ground, no means of escape. The wave broke over her and continued to surge. Her screams were drowned by the incessant hum until that was all that remained. Doctor Marie was no more. Her warning died with her.
Chapter One
Dr. Christopher Lin decided to try a dick joke or a sex joke to break the monotony. He had been surrounded by hard-assed military types ever since he’d gotten the phone call and the helicopter ride had grown dull now that he’d adjusted to the scenery of the southern Tunisian Sahara. They always joked about stuff like that, didn’t they?
He looked around for inspiration. The first thing that caught his eye—so obvious he wondered why it didn’t occur to him even before he’d done a quick scan—was the gun turret. The weapon itself consisted mostly of a hard lengthy shaft and the point where it emerged from the side of the gunship. The hull of the craft was noticeably rounded. Yes, that was perfect. And sitting astride this mighty steel phallus was the gunner.
Chris ran a hand through his medium-short black hair and loosened his tie. It didn’t do much for the heat, but at least he would be more comfortable. “Say, so you ever get to use that thing?”
The gunner looked up, his long face morose and covered with short stubble, but his grey eyes stared with subdued intensity.
“I mean,” he went on, “that thing is massive, and you seem like a, uh, healthy young man. You ought to be getting some use out of it. All that ammo piling up there… You can see the steel of that ball-shaped turret turning blue, man.”
The man simply stared at him. However, Chris thought he could detect the faintest trace of an upward curve at the side of his drooping mouth. He decided to press onward.
“Like, did you ever secretly sneak out here at night when your commanding officer was asleep to, you know, play with it?” He sniffed. “And then you sit there, totally engrossed in what you’re doing, and fantasize about all the shit you could shoot with that massive thing, to the point where you don’t even notice when your CO comes up behind you and opens the helicopter door. Then you spin around, all like—” Christ pantomimed an expression of shock, his arms spread out and eyes looking rapidly from side to side. “‘Uh, this isn’t what it looks like.’”
The man snorted and actually cracked something vaguely resembling a smile. Chris almost sighed with relief. He hadn’t totally flopped, at least. The gunner’s face resumed its usual deadpan expression.
“You’re the entertainment for the base, I guess,” he said.
“Something like that,” the scientist replied.
“Well.” The gunner produced a cigarette and drew on it slowly. “It’s only fitting to hear shit like that come out of your mouth. Because you, sir, must be a virgin.” He took another drag and blew the smoke out to dissipate across the desert.
“Eh.” Chris grimaced and glanced out the window. “That comment is less than accurate. Sorry.” He could think of at least one girl who would produce a written statement on the matter if he were to start texting her again.
The gunner shook his head slightly and looked off into space. He knew something, or thought he knew, and he would say no more about it for now. Chris decided to let it go. At least he’d talked to the man and killed a few minutes of boredom.
The rest of the troops didn’t seem that talkative, so he turned to meditation. First off, why had he been spirited away in this manner? He still had only the vaguest idea of what in God’s name this Lieutenant Doctor Kemp wanted with him. The uncertainty left him as nervous as hell, and he didn’t look forward to finding out.
He stared out the window. The helicopter’s engine and rotor blades whipped and thrummed rhythmically. The landscape both awed and frightened him. Like most Chinese-Americans, he’d started out on the West Coast. He was born in Anaheim and lived there until the age of five. His parents, who’d arrived from Chengdu about a year before his birth, pulled up stakes and moved them across the continent to Charlotte, North Carolina. It was green and fertile there.
They might have crossed a desert on the way to their new home, but Chris could not recall it. And the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan Deserts had nothing on the Sahara.
And nothing was all there was to see here. Sand, rocks, rocks, sand, more sand, and the occasional jutting boulder or rock formation stretched from horizon to horizon in what seemed like a terrestrial eternity of waste and desolation. The Sahara was approximately the same size as the contiguous United States. Despite the constant sameness of the terrain, there was an austere majesty to the space.
It was unsettling all the same. It wasn’t only the bleak appearance of the dunes and wadis that unsettled him, though. His presence in this environment made no sense.
Chris was a biologist. He’d always been fascinated by both animals and plants and the way they worked together in an ecosystem. Since 2024, he had mostly worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and had done some research at Chernobyl. His specialties were mutations and invasive species. What could possibly invade this impoverished landscape? Most organisms that might try it would end up dead. Parts of the Sahara, he recalled, were officially considered abiotic zones, places where nothing lived at all. The Atacama Desert in Chile and the Dasht-e-Lut in Iran had been similarly honored. There was nothing there for a scientist who studied life.
Unless, perhaps, it had to do with his work on the ever-popular topic of mutation.
“We’re coming up on Wall Two now,” the pilot shouted over his shoulder. “Only about twenty-five miles till we reach the base.”
Chris nodded. Good. The flight had taken longer than expected. He wondered if they were even still in Tunisia or had passed deeper into the Sahara somewhere in Libya or Algeria. If that were the case, the politics of this whole situation were more serious than he’d thought.
Why were there two walls, though? He looked down as they passed over the barrier—or where the second one would be, anyway. The foundation of one small section was almost complete. Otherwise, there were only some marked-off areas and a clearing in the sand.
Men worked, diligently, even frantically. Trucks and tents rose from the sandy plain, but otherwise, there was nothing around. How strange to see a major construction project this far out in the middle of nowhere. It would be one hell of a high wall, judging by the materials he could see clustered among the dunes.
Chris blinked as it passed out of sight. This wall was unique. The barrier and its foundation were still in progress, but he’d noticed the curve in its design. This wouldn’t be a border. There was nothing to see for miles. It was a barrier not unlike a moat. No one would try to attack from the outside, not in this isolation. Besides, an aerial strike could easily destroy their work. A dull tingle pricked at the back of his neck. There was only one logical explanation for this second wall’s construction. It was built to keep something else in.
“Dr. Lin,” the pilot called. A note of excitement rose audibly in his voice, even under the strain of having to yell, “have a look at this.” He gestured ahead and to the left.
Chris followed the gesture and his mouth dropped. “What the hell?” he exclaimed, trailing off as his breath failed him.
There it was: The Garden of Eden, the Islamic Paradise, the forest at the foot of holy Mount Qingcheng. It was a broad cluster of trees and plants too startlingly green to exist in this biome. And there was no source of water nearby that he could see, nor any transitional zone of low shrubs or grasses. At the edges of this garden, the desert simply ended and the rainforest began. It wasn’t possible.
“Now she’s spreading her le
gs,” the gunner said, seemingly from far away, “and getting wet.”
The lush beauty of the scene was broken at that moment by an angry bloom of orange fire. Chris squinted. On the haphazard wall—Wall One—surrounding the forest, a ring of workers in hazmat suits unleashed hellfire with their flamethrowers in short regular intervals. None of them advanced. They weren’t trying to burn the whole thing down. It looked more like they were holding something at bay.
“May I ask,” Chris began, speaking neither to the pilot nor the gunner specifically, “what in God’s name is going on down there?”
“Quarantine,” the pilot shouted.
“What he said,” the gunner confirmed.
Chris nodded. He hadn’t expected a full explanation until he arrived at the base and had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Kemp. Still—
“Oh, shit,” the pilot cursed. The gunship jerked aside.
The scientist clamped his left hand around the bar at his side and gritted his teeth as his body tensed. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Goddamn locust got past them,” the gunner answered. His tone was still listless, but there was an edge to it. That made Chris more nervous than anything else. And what the hell did he mean by “locust?”
